Build a People-Centered Climate Action Platform!
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Dear friends, family, and climate colleagues,
We are working on a project two years in the making that will greatly enhance the efforts of climate practitioners, policy makers, educators, and all of us who want to live on a habitable planet! We just received a seed funding grant to get started, and we need to raise a bit more to complete the budget for our critical next steps leading into the upcoming UN Climate Conference this June.
You’ll find many more details below about us, our project, and why it has the potential to be revolutionary to climate work. Every contribution and act of support will bring us closer to launching the ACE Observatory as a free platform and tool accessible to all! We appreciate any amount you can donate, and please help us by sharing this campaign!
OVERVIEW
Climate leaders are everywhere, not just within governments. Following and lifting up these voices is our only chance to tackle climate change. We have a big dream to unlock the power of whole-of-society climate action in order to attain a sustainable and just future for all – and we can only do this if we do it together!
To support and accelerate this vision, we are building the ACE Observatory, a critically important tool to track people-centered climate action. This platform, free and open to all, will serve everyone working to solve the climate crisis. It will also allow us to generate the reporting needed to help our policy leaders and the public to better understand where we are, how to best engage, and to crowdsource solutions.
Once launched, The ACE Observatory will provide the first global digital platform and tool for governments and practitioners alike to comprehensively search, visualize, track, and analyze enormous data sets on people-centered climate policies, investments, commitments, public sentiment and debate, and actions across all sectors and scales of society.
AT THE HEART OF THIS PROJECT: PEOPLE-CENTERED CLIMATE ACTION
We believe resourcing and learning from communities is the best way to greatly accelerate climate action and to protect the most vulnerable, reduce inequality, and enhance quality of life.
Nations need to enact policies and programs that support leadership within communities, enabling the co-designing of a climate-smart future that leaves no one behind.
People-Centered Climate Action does five things:
1) Puts people, and all life we are interconnected with, first –above profits & greed
2) Purposefully delivers social and economic benefits for everyone through inclusive processes
3) Lifts up community-led & community driven climate action to address the needs of disadvantaged groups
4) Enhances social equity
5) Ensures an ambitious and socially just transition
In order to identify the gaps that need to be addressed and prioritized, and to strengthen this vision across the world, we need increased knowledge sharing and a comprehensive way to track progress on People-Centered Climate Action. We have developed this project in response to this critical need. And with your help, we are ready to get started!
During the first phase of the project, we will co-design guidelines for countries to report on how they are doing on people-centered climate action. Your support will help expand the table!
Why is this so important?
We are working on a project two years in the making that will greatly enhance the efforts of climate practitioners, policy makers, educators, and all of us who want to live on a habitable planet! We just received a seed funding grant to get started, and we need to raise a bit more to complete the budget for our critical next steps leading into the upcoming UN Climate Conference this June.
You’ll find many more details below about us, our project, and why it has the potential to be revolutionary to climate work. Every contribution and act of support will bring us closer to launching the ACE Observatory as a free platform and tool accessible to all! We appreciate any amount you can donate, and please help us by sharing this campaign!
OVERVIEW
Climate leaders are everywhere, not just within governments. Following and lifting up these voices is our only chance to tackle climate change. We have a big dream to unlock the power of whole-of-society climate action in order to attain a sustainable and just future for all – and we can only do this if we do it together!
To support and accelerate this vision, we are building the ACE Observatory, a critically important tool to track people-centered climate action. This platform, free and open to all, will serve everyone working to solve the climate crisis. It will also allow us to generate the reporting needed to help our policy leaders and the public to better understand where we are, how to best engage, and to crowdsource solutions.
Once launched, The ACE Observatory will provide the first global digital platform and tool for governments and practitioners alike to comprehensively search, visualize, track, and analyze enormous data sets on people-centered climate policies, investments, commitments, public sentiment and debate, and actions across all sectors and scales of society.
AT THE HEART OF THIS PROJECT: PEOPLE-CENTERED CLIMATE ACTION
We believe resourcing and learning from communities is the best way to greatly accelerate climate action and to protect the most vulnerable, reduce inequality, and enhance quality of life.
Nations need to enact policies and programs that support leadership within communities, enabling the co-designing of a climate-smart future that leaves no one behind.
People-Centered Climate Action does five things:
1) Puts people, and all life we are interconnected with, first –above profits & greed
2) Purposefully delivers social and economic benefits for everyone through inclusive processes
3) Lifts up community-led & community driven climate action to address the needs of disadvantaged groups
4) Enhances social equity
5) Ensures an ambitious and socially just transition
In order to identify the gaps that need to be addressed and prioritized, and to strengthen this vision across the world, we need increased knowledge sharing and a comprehensive way to track progress on People-Centered Climate Action. We have developed this project in response to this critical need. And with your help, we are ready to get started!
During the first phase of the project, we will co-design guidelines for countries to report on how they are doing on people-centered climate action. Your support will help expand the table!
Why is this so important?
- The climate crisis is urgent and we need unprecedented action and change in policy & systems on a scale not yet seen
- We can, and must, deliver both ambitious climate action and better lives for everyone. This is only doable if everyone is at the table.
- Without widespread public participation, engagement, and advocacy, the world’s governments won’t be able to make this happen
- There is currently no system that can help us track and easily analyze people-centered climate action
- This digital platform & tool will make what currently takes weeks of work to sort through hundreds of documents and reports possible in a few clicks of a button
- Government and climate leaders to track, report on, and better understand how they are doing on climate action
Generate targeted reporting that lends support to those drafting and advocating for critically needed national & global policies - Compare countries’ progress in climate education, public participation, training, public awareness and access to information, – especially where they can do better, and what they can learn from each other
- Increase access for everyone everywhere to ensure more transparency and accountability from their government leaders
- Analyze and visualize patterns of public sentiment, a useful tool for those planning effective climate campaigns
- Facilitate fundraising for people-centered climate action by highlighting and amplifying local efforts and their impacts as part of a larger collective context
- This tool will help us to see patterns that are currently invisible to us, and to create new and important narratives to better understand and connect with what is happening and how we all can help!
- We understand what’s needed and have many important relationships through years of participating in the UN Climate process
- We are teaming up with an incredible tech partner who has the experience and infrastructure to build this platform.
- And we have now been awarded a seed funding grant to get started on the initial work we aim to achieve before the next UN Climate conference in June.
- Your help to raise the rest of our Phase I budget: our critical goal of $4000, and ideally we hope to raise the full $10,000 as outlined in our stretch goals below.
- Should we raise more, any additional funds will be rolled into our budget for Phase II of the project, setting us up to reach for the goal of presenting a beta version of the ACE Observatory platform & tool at COP27 in November!
About Us: We both serve on the coordinating teams of the US ACE Coalition and the UN Climate Education, Communication, and Outreach Stakeholders (ECOS) community. For the last two years, we have been gathering the necessary partners, building relationships, developing our project concept, and laying the foundation to create the ACE Observatory. A little more about each of us…
Isatis Cintrón Rodríguez is a climate scientist and activist born and raised in Puerto Rico. As an islander, working to solve the climate crisis is about survival for Isatis. She was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship to study light absorbing aerosol transport pathways, impacts, and potential mitigation policies that affect our frozen land, and has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund to perform cryospheric research in alpine glaciers. While working on her PhD, Isatis has served as the Latin America & Caribbean regional coordinator for Citizen’s Climate International with a focus on advancing climate-smart finance and public participation at all levels of society.
Laura Weiland is a climate advocate and organizer based in New York. After working with many student groups of all ages, Laura is dedicated to supporting a safer future for young people across the planet. She is currently working on her MBA degree, and holds a Masters in Sustainable Development with a focus on Community Development & Social Action. Laura is the Omega Institute's Climate Program Lead, and former director of the Omega Center for Sustainable Living, where she spent a decade working on campus sustainability and environmental programming including local, regional, national, and global climate initiatives.__________________________________________________________________________________________
If you are interested to learn more specifics about our project and the help we need now, we’ve included more information and further context below about why we believe the ACE Observatory will be a game changer!
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BACKGROUND: WHAT IS ACE?
The 26th UN Climate Conference of the Parties (COP26) recently came to a close leaving many people feeling that collectively governments had missed the mark once again.
The science is clear, we have an ever shrinking window to act boldly if we are to stay within 1.5 degrees of planetary warming —and the stakes are high. Countries can’t act at the scale required without vastly increased and deeply coordinated engagement across civil society.
Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) is a term adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to denote work under Article 6 of the Convention (1992) and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (2015). ACE provides a framework for coherence and coordination as we join forces and build capacity for people-centered climate action.
According to the UNFCCC, the overarching goal of ACE is to empower all members of society to engage in climate action through:
OUR PROJECT: THE ACE OBSERVATORY
The Problem: Since the adoption of the original UNFCCC treaty, ACE has been critically under-resourced and left in the background. This has resulted in unbalanced implementation of the six ACE elements. The lack of prioritization and definition for effective ACE implementation has prevented us from unlocking the potential of ACE to accelerate climate action. Today, many countries still have yet to follow UN guidelines and appoint an ACE National Focal Point within their government, or to create an ACE National Strategic Plan.
The ACE Observatory, A Timely and Important Solution: Creating the ACE Observatory platform will be a game changer. We are teaming up with webLyzard technology, creators of the UNDP Live Web Intelligence Application, to take on this endeavor. We can innovate faster with the right tools. We are excited to connect local action with policy and investment outcomes to ramp up climate readiness!
ACE Observatory Project Components Include:
- Co-develop ACE Protocols that will inform the ACE Observatory platform through benchmarks and criteria for effective implementation to facilitate immediate and comprehensive monitoring and reporting of ACE around the world.
- Create a Content Repository with regionally specific information and data inputs for the ACE Observatory in addition to the tool's capacity to access all publicly available information on the internet.
- Launch the ACE Observatory Platform to analyze effectiveness and track global sentiment on policy and ACE efforts using the co-developed protocols.
- Aggregate and Disseminate Information by producing and distributing science-based policy analysis reports.
- Provide Capacity-Building and Training on the tool for policy makers and ACE practitioners.
Once launched, the ACE Observatory will make actionable analysis much easier, greatly improving global efforts to address the climate crisis through an ACE lens. This tool will help us all to amplify our stories and to frame our individual work within the larger and collective context of ACE.
This is our moment. We have the power to collectively transform our societies and make the timely and critical shifts necessary in finance, governance, policy and innovation.
THE SUPPORT WE NEED NOW
Our initial goal will cover the most critical costs we need help with before June. Your contributions of any amount are helpful, very much appreciated, and will support the following project costs during Phase I:
Our Initial Crowdfunding Goal of $4000 will pay for:
Our initial goal will cover the most critical costs we need help with before June. Your contributions of any amount are helpful, very much appreciated, and will support the following project costs during Phase I:
Our Initial Crowdfunding Goal of $4000 will pay for:
- Virtual Round Table Sessions: Your support will allow us to reach and include participants across all global regions who represent diverse perspectives, expertise, and knowledge during the roundtable sessions as we co-develop metrics and benchmarks for the ACE protocols that will inform the observatory creation. This budget item covers the stipends for 14 facilitators and notetakers, our tech support person for the sessions, and administration costs.
Attaining these stretch goals would greatly support our Phase I work by covering report distribution, communication and enhanced research
- Design & Printing Costs : This budget item will allow us to create and distribute a beautifully designed report on the co-generated guidelines to government officials and ACE practitioners during the UNFCCC intersessional session in Bonn, Germany (June 2022).
- Website & Newsletter: This budget item will support us to post and share all relevant information throughout Phases I & II of the project, and provide a landing page for the report and other reference materials that we generate.
- Research Assistant: By reaching our crowdfunding goal, this budget item would allow us to add an extra research assistant, moving the work ahead faster!
Our initial & stretch fundraising goals totaling $10,000 could be achieved by:
- 400 people donating $25
- 200 people donating $50
- 100 people donating $100
- 50 people donating $200
- 20 people donating $500
- 10 people donating $1000
HOW ELSE YOU CAN GET INVOLVED & SUPPORT
- Be part of this work with us!
- Please share our crowdfunding campaign (https://gofund.me/6f0c764e) on your social media channels and ask your friends & colleagues to donate and share the campaign as well!
- Speak directly with several friends & colleagues who you think would be interested in this project and ask if they can donate and share this crowdfunding campaign with others!
- Every contribution and act of support makes a difference, and brings us closer to launching the ACE Observatory as a free platform and tool accessible to all!
THANK YOU!
You have our sincere thanks for joining us and supporting this work as we begin the first phase of the project!
This is a community effort, and we are grateful to each of you!
Organizer
Laura Weiland
Organizer
Hudson, NY